2018-1968 : 50 years of wearables ! Find out how we got into Smart Glasses

Today XpertEye celebrates its 3 years !

May 2015
First delivery of XpertEye developed by AMA XpertEye .The use case was about first responders on the field to receiving live guidance and triage instructions from the hospital in order to improve patient care.

Before, in 2014
AMA brought technical support to Surgeon Philippe Collin at CHP St Grégoire, in France for the world premiere between him operating a patient in France and his Japanese colleague, Professor Goto in Nagoya University. The use case was mentoring, Dr Collin was wearing Google Glass, sharing his vision and speaking live, hands free while Professor Goto was following the surgery on its computer.

In 2012
Google launched the first smart glasses on « Explorer » program, meaning that they were asking their users to share feedbacks to help them improve their hardware. Consumer market was a failure but B2B software developers showed an interest in the glasses and started working on tele-assistance and others applications.

Anyway, it’s in 1989…
…When Columbia students started working on the « Private Eye » concept, based on Doug Platt’s invention, that we saw the real first head mounted screen. They tried to build an augmented reality system to repair laser printers. We can consider « Private Eye » as the first attempt to create a portable “Google Glass type” computer.

In 1980Steve Mann, scientist and inventor at University of Toronto was recognized as “The Father of The Wearable Computer” for his invention: the « Digital Eye Glass ». He was the first to create and manage a complete wearable solution using smart glasses driven by a computer placed in his backpack in order to get Augmented Reality.

Steve Mann and his digital eye glass

But its’ in 1968
So 50 years ago, the scientists Ivan Sutherland and David Evans, at Utah university built the first head mounted display called « The Sword OF Damocles » due to the way it was worn on the viewer’s head.
Sutherland explained that“The goal of Augmented Reality is to create a system in which the user cannot tell the difference between the real world and virtual augmentation of it.”
The concept will later be followed up and developed by Steve Mann and Steven Feiner from Columbia.

For 50 years, people have been working hard to improve productivity, guarantee efficiency and for optimum comfort. At the beginning, it was more about scientist investigations. But now, smart glasses tele-assistance solutions like XpertEye affords us to have a better insight of customers’ needs and use cases than a scientist search .
Customers’ needs and use cases are the keys to success, without those considerations, it could remain an amazing technology but turns as a simple gadget.
Since 2012, new smart glasses manufacturers have sprung up, often with different features due to diverse environments, use cases and needs.

Industry and Healthcare don’t meet the same standards and requirements, software developers really play a major role with manufacturers by providing them field constraints and users feedbacks.

More smart glasses are coming and they are getting smarter. We discover new smart glasses every day. The Augmented Reality adoption is on track in Healthcare and Industry, with the mention « digital transformation 4.0 »

But it’s still a “work in progress” and Christian Guillemot, AMA XpertEye founder used to say that:

<<When we’ll wonder “how we used to do before ?”, (about Smart glasses B2B solution, as it’s the case for the mobile phone,) we’ll know that we made it.>>